How Israel’s assassination strategy evolved to become tech-savvy and precise

Way back in March, 2004 while attending a relative’s baby-warming ceremony in Gurugram, I received a call from Yaron Mayer, the then Political Secretary of the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi, with whom I was acquainted. It was just a courtesy call, at the end of which he pithily broke the story, “We have eliminated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin." Sheikh Yassin, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic, was the founder and ‘spiritual leader’ of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that had begun to put the Palestinian Liberation Organisation into shadow. Three hellfire missiles shot from an Israeli AH-64 helicopter during the Salat-al-Fajr (morning prayers) in Gaza reduced the 67-year-old into a heap of charred bones. They simultaneously carried away at least seven others standing around him to the other world.

The targetted killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the Qatar-based Chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau, in Tehran not only revived the memories of ‘elimination’ of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (and Yassin’s successor Abdel Aziz Al-Rantasi, who was similarly done away with in another Apache strike within less than a month on April 17, 2004), but also put the spotlight back on cost-benefit analysis of Israel’s politics of assassination. Gaza, in 2004, was under Israeli occupation. Tehran, 1860 km away from Jerusalem, is located deep inside the enemy country, Iran.

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In 2004, the Prime Minister was Ariel Sharon, who had still not turned into a peacenik, uncharacteristic of himself. In 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in power. Netanyahu, despite his hawkish image, was condemned as indecisive and fickle-minded by Late Meir Dagan, the former chief of Mossad, a strong proponent of the politics of assassination.

Dagan, appointed as Director-General of Mossad in August 2002 by the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, was tasked with the precise object of disrupting the Iranian nuclear weapons project, which both these former military men saw as an existential threat to Israel.

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According to Dagan, the best way was to identify Iran’s key nuclear and missile scientists, spot them, and kill them. Mossad, informs Ronen Bergmen, in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (2018) pinpointed fifteen such targets, of whom it successfully eliminated six. The victims met their ends mostly while they were on their work in the morning, in their cars, when an unsuspecting motorcyclist would attach a bomb with a short fuse to their vehicles. Apart from this, a general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard corps, who oversaw the missile project, was blown up in his headquarters together with 17 other men.

Dagan defended his policy of assassination, both on moral and practical grounds, at a time when Netanyahu, after becoming the Prime Minister for a second time in 2009, felt their utility was declining. This was indeed a climb down from the era of his predecessor Ehud Olmert, during whose tenure as Prime Minister, Mossad was given completely free hand and enhanced budgetary allocation. Dagan felt that Israel could fulfil its objective vis-à-vis Iran—preventing the Islamic republic from developing the nuclear bomb—at lesser cost through assassination than through all-out war, which many in Israel felt was the only alternative.

Assassinations, Dagan maintained, have a practical and psychological effect. While it is true that a dead person can be replaced by a living person by the enemy country, it might not have the same effect. Dagan argued that few could actually have replaced Napoleon, President Roosevelt, or a Prime Minister like Churchill if they were assassinated. Also, assassinations could be a lot more moral than wars, which take a huge toll upon life and property. Neutralising a few important persons would actually save the lives of many soldiers and civilians.

Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination is still shrouded in mystery. This is in sharp contrast to the elimination of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s senior most military commander, who was killed in an airstrike on his apartment in the Harat-Hriek neighbourhood of Beirut a few hours before Haniyeh’s death. In the case of Haniyeh, it is speculative whether it was a missile strike or a bomb planted below his bed that took the life of the Hamas leader. No doubt Iran’s humiliation is complete at its inability to protect a key ally in a high security zone of national capital. The Middle East is on edge as an all-out Iranian offensive is feared any moment. The question is whether Mossad pulled out the entire operation without the help of compromised elements within the Iranian security apparatus.

Iran is not completely an unfamiliar territory for Israel. Not only did Israel enjoy a good relationship with Iran (then Persia) under its last monarch, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who actually requested Mossad’s services to stem the tide of popular Leftists and Islamist discontent against his tottering regime in the late 1970s, but the advent of the Islamic Revolution did not completely rupture the link.

Though Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ascended to power in Tehran on December 3, 1979, promising to crush Israel and punish the US, and fostered the formation of Shia militant group Hezbollah in civil-war ridden Lebanon, Israel and Iran actually ramped up covert military ties in the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) as both countries viewed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as the common enemy.

In early 1980, according to a monograph by RAND Corporation (2011), the then Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin approved the shipment of tires for Phantom fighter planes as well as weapons for the Iranian Army, ignoring US policy, which stated that no arms would be sent to Iran until the release of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran (Israel and Iran: A Dangerous Rivalry, P.14).

Even as Israel and Iran covertly cooperated on military issues during the Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic republic ratcheted up passions against the Jewish state in public. The slogan used in those days was “Rah-e-Karbala as Qods Migozarad” (The path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala). Following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (1982), in the midst of civil war in that Levantine country, Iran engineered the formation of Hezbollah.

This brings us to one of the first Iranian targets that Israel tried to assassinate, viz. Ali Akbar Mohtashmipur. This Iranian cleric, a close companion of Ayatollah Khomeini in the Islamic Revolution, helped the formation of Hezbollah in Lebanon while serving as Iran’s ambassador to Syria in the early 1980s. For the first few years, Israel had remained clueless about the origin of Hezbollah, until Mossad zeroed down upon Mohtashmipur.

However, the Israeli government faced considerable moral and tactical dilemmas in authorising his assassination: moral because Israel was conventionally desisting from targeting officials of sovereign nations even if they were against Israel; and tactical because Mohtashmipur spent his time either in Damascus or Tehran, both of which were difficult for the Mossad to penetrate into.

Ultimately, Mossad decided to take down Mohtashmipur with a rather hackneyed contrivance, viz, a parcel bomb with a mixed record of success. Ronen Bergman informs, in Rise and Kill First, that at the end of 1983, Nahum Admoni, the Mossad Director, gave the Prime Minister a Red Page to sign. A dossier attached catalogued a series of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks against Israeli and American targets perpetrated at the instance of Mohtashmipur. Shamir ultimately signed the Red Page.

On February 14, 1984, the Iranian Embassy in Damascus received a large parcel, apparently from a well-known London publishing house owned by Iranians. It was clearly marked “Personal for His Excellency” and thus sent to Mohtashmipur’s office on the second floor. Nothing happened as the ambassador’s secretary unwrapped it and saw a cardboard box containing a shining volume in English about Shiite Holy Place in Iran. She took the book into the ambassador’s room. And Mohtashmipur’s tried to open the fascinating, but dummy book, and there was a deafening explosion. The impact of the blast left Mohtashmipur bloodied, with his one ear, his one hand, and most of the fingers of the other hand torn off. One of his eyes was damaged by shrapnel. Yet he survived the attack in a mutilated state, dying 35 years later due to COVID-19. Had he opened the book closer to his face, his head would have been blown off, as he later told in an interview with an Iranian television channel.

Israeli assassinations have become much more tech-savvy with time. Mohsen Fakrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, who was disregardful of his personal security, was brought down by a shower of bullets when he was driving his car from the Caspian Sea resort to their country home in Absard. Fakrizadeh had been on the radar of Mossad for almost 14 years. The bullets were fired upon him from a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck parked on the side of the road connecting Absard to the main highway. A machine gun of 7.62 mm was concealed beneath the tarpaulin and construction material used as cover. The most startling feature of the assassination was that there was no human sniper on spot. It was conducted through artificial intelligence (AI), remotely controlled from nearly 1,000 miles away. Interestingly, Fakrizadeh’s wife, Sedigheh Ghasemi, who was with him in the car, was not killed. The planners have all left Iran when the startling assassination took place. Like in the case of Ismail Haniyeh, the assassination has left Iran astounded. It was only subsequently that the AI angle came to light to the astonishment of the world.

The writer is author of the book ‘The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India’ (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.